The Goblin Strategy: Why Your Brain Is Still Fighting Enemies That Don't Exist Anymore

You've been here before. New situation, same gut punch. Same white-knuckle reaction. Same outcome you swore you were done with.

And some part of you is genuinely exhausted by how predictable that's gotten.

Here's what nobody tells you about your past: it was supposed to shape you. That's the whole point of the system. Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine, and it is exceptional at its job. Every hard lesson, every betrayal, every time the floor dropped out without warning - your brain filed all of it away and built itself a shortcut. This feels like that. React accordingly.

It kept you safe. It really, truly did.

But we need to talk about what happens when the shortcut becomes the default. When your most sophisticated survival responses start running on autopilot in situations that don't actually call for survival mode at all.

The fire drake problem

Picture a classic RPG - the old-school kind, where you start in a small village and work your way out into the world. Early in the game, you fight slimes and goblins. You study the patterns. You build a strategy. It works, every single time. You level up. You feel competent, because you are competent.

Then you cross into a new region. The landscape looks a little familiar (same basic fantasy world, same general vibe) but the enemies are different. Different mechanics, different weaknesses, different rules. And if you're still running the goblin strategy on a fire drake?. You already know how that ends. Badly, and probably repeatedly, until you either adapt or quit.

Your past is your early-game experience. It's real, it counts, and it absolutely taught you something worth knowing. The problem isn't that you learned those lessons. The problem is when the strategy calcifies. When it stops being a choice and becomes a reflex. When the fire drake shows up and your hands are already reaching for the goblin playbook before you've even registered what you're actually facing.

That's not wisdom. That's muscle memory wearing wisdom's clothes.

The lessons with heat on them

Here's where it gets important, and I want to be honest with you about this part.

Not all learned strategies are equally sticky. The ones most likely to run on pure autopilot are the ones still attached to strong emotion - grief, shame, betrayal, rage, humiliation. The bigger the original wound, the more urgently your brain wants to protect you from anything that remotely resembles it.

A grudge isn't just a feeling. It's a strategy - one you built during one of the worst moments of your life, when your options felt limited and your pain was very, very real. It made sense then. It might have even been the right call then. But it's still running now, in circumstances that are genuinely different, against people who may have nothing to do with the original injury.

Same goes for the cultural scripts and traditions we carry forward without examination. Some of them are beautiful and worth keeping. Some of them are calcified goblin strategies that stopped serving anyone a generation ago and we keep running them anyway, because that's how it's always been done, and questioning them feels like betrayal.

History is full of people (and institutions, and nations) who doubled down on the goblin strategy. Who mistook familiarity for correctness. Who called it loyalty, or strength, or just the way things are - while the fire drake burned everything down around them.

We are not immune to this. Any of us.

The gap between stimulus and response

There's a concept I come back to constantly, in my own life and in my work with clients. It was framed beautifully by Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who wrote Man's Search for Meaning: between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.

That space - that pause between something happens and I react to it - is where your actual agency lives.

The problem is that for most of us, most of the time, that space is approximately zero milliseconds wide. The stimulus hits, the brain pattern-matches to something old and threatening, and the reaction is already out of your mouth before your prefrontal cortex - the part responsible for reasoning, context, and nuance - has had a chance to weigh in.

This is neuroscience not a character flaw. Your brain's threat-detection system, the amygdala, is faster than your reasoning brain. It was designed to be. In a genuine emergency, that speed saves lives.

In a disagreement with your partner about whose turn it is to call the plumber, that speed creates a lot of unnecessary damage.

The work, and it is work, real and ongoing, is learning to widen that gap. Not to eliminate your reactions, which is both impossible and inadvisable, but to create just enough space to ask: Is this actually what I think it is? Is the goblin strategy really what this moment needs?

Two techniques worth trying

I want to give you something practical here, not just a reframe.

1. Name it to tame it

This comes straight out of neuroscience and is one of the simplest, most well-supported interventions we have. When you notice a strong emotional reaction firing up, name the emotion out loud or in writing - specifically and accurately. Not just "I'm upset." Try: I'm feeling humiliated. I'm feeling afraid. I'm feeling dismissed.

Research by neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and colleagues found that labeling an emotion activates the prefrontal cortex and simultaneously reduces amygdala activation. In plain English: naming what you're feeling literally calms the alarm system and brings your reasoning brain back online.

This is your pause button. It doesn't make the emotion disappear. But it does give you just enough space to choose what happens next.

When you notice the heat rising, try this: stop, name the feeling as precisely as you can, and then ask yourself one question - does this situation actually match what I think it matches, or does it just rhyme with something old?

Rhyming is not the same as repeating. New circumstances deserve fresh eyes, even when they feel familiar.

2. The curious observer

This one comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and I use it myself more than I can tell you.

When a strong reaction shows up - the one that feels ancient and automatic and bigger than the current situation warrants - try stepping back inside your own mind and observing it, rather than becoming it. Not suppressing it. Not arguing with it. Just... noticing it, with genuine curiosity rather than judgment.

Oh. Here's that feeling again. Interesting. What is it trying to protect me from? What does it think is happening right now?

This is sometimes called defusion in ACT - creating a little distance between you and your thoughts or feelings, so that you're the one having the experience rather than being it. You are not your goblin strategy. You are the player who developed it, and players can always update their approach.

Treat your old reactions like a well-meaning but slightly outdated advisor. They have information. They're not always right about the current situation. You can thank them for showing up and still choose a different move.

What self-awareness actually is

I want to say something about self-awareness here, because it gets misused as a concept constantly.

Self-awareness isn't about having an exhaustive psychological biography of yourself. It's not about being able to explain every childhood wound in clinical terms. It's not even about catching yourself every time you slip.

Self-awareness, at its most useful, is simply the capacity to notice (in real time, or close to it) that you are in a pattern. That something is running. That the reaction firing up in you right now has history attached to it, and that history may or may not be relevant to what's actually happening.

It's the moment you think: wait, why am I so activated right now? before you've already torched the conversation.

That moment is everything. It's the beginning of choice.

And it grows with practice. Not dramatic, overnight transformation - slow, unglamorous, repetitive practice. The kind where you catch it after the fact at first, then during, then sometimes just before. That's the whole game. Not perfection. Pattern recognition of your own patterns.

You became fluent in your old strategies through repetition. You get fluent in new ones the same way.

You're not doomed to this story

The past is a fact. You cannot edit it, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I suggested you could simply reframe your way out of genuine pain or real injustice. Some things that happened were hard. Some were wrong. Some left marks that are still there.

But what those things mean and how much authority they have over your current choices - that part is negotiable. That part is yours.

The goblin strategy got you here. You don't have to carry it into every new region.

What's one old strategy you've noticed yourself running lately - one that might need an update? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And if you're ready to take a real look at your inventory - the whole thing, honestly, with support - that's exactly the work we do together in coaching.

No pressure. Just an open door.

— Judy the Gamer Girl Coach

Interested in working together? Coaching inquiries are always welcome — find the link in my profile.